Project of a house-commune for Anzhero-Sudzhensk as a part of the Soviet utopian discourse of the late 1920s and early 1930s

Abstract

During the ideological war waged by the Bolsheviks, housing was an important front, significant as a field in which the contemporary discourse found its material manifestations. The present article discusses an example of a literal interpretation of the radical ideology of the period: the project of a Siberian house-commune by Nikolai Kuzmin. The project was an attempt to transplant a utopian (linguistic) idea directly into an architectural complex. Although Kuzmin had assumed that the project would be implemented, in fact it was not feasible and never began to exist outside the realm of discourse.